


Feverfew

by tnico



Series: Alpha!Sorceresses / Omega!Witchers abo au [2]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha Keira Metz, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Lambert, it's abo but more about just them tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:00:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23515054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnico/pseuds/tnico
Summary: Though Lambert’s never really thought of it asbeing in Keira’s roomsbefore. She was there, and he was just-- sometimes also there. Because after-all-this-time-stillshe couldn’t be trusted with the getting-going and keeping-going trick for a good hearth, even if the fate of theall the Sphereswas riding on her keeping an eye on the First Eternal Fire for, like,an hour.So as long as it was just the two of them out here, building one good fire and sticking around for it was just more economical than with all the fucking running-back-and-forth like he’s a stripling again and doing his punishment laps because whateveris she supposed to do when she's so cold besides-maybe-perhaps wearingsocks--fucking wait a second.“You know how to keep a fire going,” he accuses.
Relationships: Lambert/Keira Metz
Series: Alpha!Sorceresses / Omega!Witchers abo au [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693453
Comments: 15
Kudos: 49





	Feverfew

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just kind of banging this off casually in chunks and letting it develop as it goes and but the direction got, uh, unexpectedly serious right off. A very different tone than the first piece! Specifically, there’s a cw for getting pretty deep in Lambert's witcher issues, personal issues, and abo-specific issues (yes that's what witchers need, _more issues_. you're welcome!!)
> 
> There's also some resultant processing and discussion of them, but it's through the lens of a society that jags into the early medieval morally often enough that while it's well-intended, don't expect anything particularly _enlightened_.

This isn’t anywhere near the first time he’s been in Keira’s rooms. The rooms she took over without asking the way sorceresses everywhere are apparently just _biologically compelled to do_ when they alight at Kaer Morhen, like it's nesting patterns or something (which he personally considers as just another mark in his column that Yennefer’s due her own entry in the Bestiary.)

(Truthfully, Lambert’s never really been able to get any good bile up on that front. He doesn't actually-- _mind,_ when there's company out here.)

(And anyway, it’s not like they've longer the need to ration out the _space_.)

Though he’s never really thought of it as being _in Keira’s room_ before. She was there, and he was just-- sometimes also there. Because after-all-this-time _-still_ she couldn’t be trusted with the getting-going and keeping-going trick to a good hearth, even if the fate of _all the Spheres_ was riding on her keeping an eye on the First Eternal Fire for, like, _an_ _hour_. 

So as long as it was just the two of them out here, building one good fire and sticking around for it was just more _economical_ than with all the fucking _running-back-and-forth_ like he’s a stripling again doing his punishment laps because what _ever_ is she supposed to do when she's cold besides-maybe-perhaps wearing _socks_ \-- _fucking wait a second._

“You know how to keep a fire going,” he accuses.

Keira gives him another one of those quiet-smiling-unimpressed-and-something-else looks, which Lambert waspishly thinks is already getting fucking grating, because she _never said_ (up until she said-- what she said.)

“Well, yes. I do have a fairly regular use for a proper hearth in my line of work.”

He goes over to where he had left it banked for her now, because keeping his attention to the fact he's been _hoodwinked_ ( _yet_ _again)_ by a _treacherous sorceress_ (another apparent biological inclination, and if these creatures are just gonna keep _jerking witchers around_ maybe they oughtta put them all in the Bestiary, what else is it _for_ ) means he doesn’t have to put his attention-- anywhere else. He had never found all the opulence and dressings and fucking _embroidered_ _silks_ she portaled in here anything like intimidating before, because Keira might like to be kept in her high-wrought shit even out here but at least Lambert knew how to build a fucking _fire_.

Only now the familiarity of Keira’s room being exactly the same as it was this morning doesn’t soothe for shit because now everything _else_ is different and the fact everything in here’s fancy and rich and smells like her has stopped being one of those _nice-things-we-don’t-think-about_ and is now just _more_ on what, he'll be honest, has already been _a fucking lot_ _today_.

He shrugs off his gambeson and goes to drop it in a heap right on the floor next to the fire like always (because it keeps it warm for when he's due to duck out and never fails to make her wrinkle her nose at him) and is suddenly gripped by his own indecision. It takes him by surprise, because he’s been gripped by a whole lot of things on the job, but that’s usually just in the literal and thus generally comes with the opportunity to grip them right back but harder. Indecision, however, is something he mostly got out of the way early on, when he _confirmed_ his _hypothesis_ ( _see, he listens_ ) that your average drowner is always gonna act like your average drowner and your average human is always gonna act like your average human and for only one of these encounters will putting the work in on his side actually aid his chance of it ending in success for him, so better to save his energy for the fucking drowners.

So the sudden indecision isn’t _new_ to him, no, but he’s realizing that maybe if it’s _old_ enough, you sort of forget how you dealt with it after a while. Because should he still be dropping his shit on her floor, now? She said nothing had to change, that she wouldn’t try to- _do_ anything unless he wanted her to do anything, which. He _wants_ things to change. He wants this to be about more than relief (and she said she) and about more than the heat, still nascent and warm where it's resting in the small of his back, and then there's what's beyond the sex, where he wants to do-- things (and can’t even say it, fucking _pathetic_ ). So should he be- does he, should she- or should he ask? _No_ , _idiot_ , _what_ , one single heat with an alpha he actually likes that _hasn’t even happened yet_ and he’s already so randy to toss _everything he fucking is_ at her feet for a lick of her approval like all the other people in her life tend to do?

Which, shit, if they're going to be a _thing_ , ( _are_ they going to be a, are they-- which, _why_ , but she said, she _said_ ) and gods-damn it he can't close on these thoughts in his own fucked-up _head_ , this is why he usually saves trying to process deeper shit like this to the times when he's already far too drunk and thus has the confidence that any of those entirely-too-revealing things he may feel compelled to shout to the sky are already way too garbled to be comprehensible even to him.

Moving past from what he'd _thought_ they were and trying to get a grip on what they apparently _are_ feels like-- like.

Like it does when he's kicking around at the mouth of a cave and grumbling curses in the open air because he doesn't have the honey or time to spare burning out the dose of Cat. How he has to brace himself for how stepping out to confront the sun, and how the light'll always stab into his eyes and leave him half-blind and smarting. And sure he can trust (and can he? because why’s he even got reason to trust her, but what the fuck else does he have going for him in his life that she’d _want_ but- what she said) that it'll get better later if he just goes through with it because it _always_ goes and gets better later and he _knows that_ because he's _done it before_ but that means he also knows just how much it'll fucking hurt _now_ , in that zinging, aching way of _too much too much_ , one of those more roundabout ways of hurting the Trials only made that much worse (thanks so _fucking much_.)

Keira has apparently moved to sit on the waste-of-good-bandaging-linens that make up her ludicrously expensive bedspread ( _her bed, she brought it here_ _, her room_ ) and has just been watching him apparently having a fucking _life-crisis_ over whether to put down his fucking _jacket_. She’s got her legs tucked to the side and her hands folded in her lap. She looks perfectly calm, and for a brief and desperate moment centering on that helps with how his own thoughts are slipping through his hands like water and going down straight into a whirlpool. 

But then the thought slips right-the-fuck-through that she's totally calm and he's _losing his shit_ _all over_ , which, yeah, _that's_ the sort of impression he wants to make on her, how was it easier to be fucking this all up _less_ when he didn’t know there was something there he _could_ be fucking up--

So. He’s just been staring into the fire with his coat in his hand, unmoving, for minutes at least by this point.

“I think I’m having a moment,” he gets out eventually, because he has to do _something,_ at least.

“You are definitely having a moment,” Keira agrees. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

 _Go_ , he wants to say, because he’s feeling too-sensitive all over in a way that’s less his heat and more the nerve-shock sting of exposing too-fresh skin to the open air and it's not safe, it's not _safe_ to have someone around when you're aching and belly-up and your throat's exposed, but he can’t ask her to go, this is her room, what sort of shit is demanding she leave her _own room_ , he’s the one in _her room_ , so he needs to get gone if anyone is, which means he needs to _make his body start moving_ , because he needs to _go_ -

He's struck like a slap by a sudden memory, distant but still clear and still colder at the touch of it like he's seeing through a pane of fresh ice.

And it's something he hadn’t thought of in _ages_ , in almost a _century_ , so why the _fuck_ now. The vibrant echoes of this _stupid,_ the _stupidest_ fucking urge to skitter under her bed like he used to always try when he was a helpless, _useless_ little kid, because it made him harder to reach and easier to forget and it was always safer when everything hurt to lick his wounds if he were somewhere small and dark and alone.

“Lambert. Breathe,” Keira says, and now she's staring into his face (when did she get up?) and pressing her palm, cool and dry, to his cheek. The other's a gentle pressure on his shoulder-blades, a slow but unyielding push to get him leaning forward.

The sudden intake of breath shudders through him and the grey that'd been creeping at the corner of his vision recedes. He realizes, as if at a distance, that he is still holding his _fucking_ jacket out and too-tight in his white-knuckled grip.

The breaths start shuddering out of him again, slowly, eventually. He's too busy focusing on the manual side of getting his shit in some way back together that when "I thought they'd carved it out of me," slips out, it takes him a too-long moment to realize he's the one that said it.

"This has happened before," Keira surmises. It's not a question, which helps with Lambert's urge to immediately deny it and _go_ because it's not _safe_ , which, he's a witcher now, _he's_ the not-fucking-safe of the lot in any given room, and he's been a monster-killing-monster for so much longer than he ever was a ( _stupid, scared_ ) kid, so _why now_.

"Why _now_ ," he gets out, because he can't just keep _standing there_ , and all-his-life the only thing he's ever _got_ to rely on has been himself. But he can't even lean on his familiar wellspring of his resentment towards the everything _else_ to cover this new gap, because it doesn't even come out baseline-petulant, just wretched.

"Is that question in earnest?"

"No, I-- You got an _answer?_ I-- _Fuck_."

Keira drops her hand from his face, shifting the one that had been rubbing small circles over his tensed shoulder-blades through his tunic (when did she?) over his shoulders and against his chest without breaking the contact, applying another slow-but-inexorable push to his sternum to straighten him back up.

"Answers, perhaps, not an answer. When I've worked with those visited by such sudden afflictions, I've found there's often no single wick that lights it; rather one mired within a tangle of them."

"Don't treat me like your fucking _patient_ , Keira," he says, and the bristle through him at his indignation is something to seize upon. Lambert might have lost himself this way when he was a kid, but he's a fucking witcher now: he can rely on himself, he can rely on his body. Shouldn't be too different from the drills for shrugging off the fog of being Axii'd, a lifetime ago.

Awareness is control. So much of the deep-sounding shit the instructors liked to toss in front of them turned out to just be fucking puddles when he could be bothered to give them a splash, but that one he'll give them. Like with meditation: deep breaths, find the pulse of his blood and feel its flow, push that always-burning core of him he's never once let go of through the rest of his body and into the all-of-him.

"You're not," she agrees, "yet it's also no cost to me to treat you with patience. We have time yet, I'd like you to take what you need."

He frowns, only half-focused on her words. He's got the feeling in his hands back, now, and can feel his knuckles locked and taut around the padded material. From there it's a matter of slow, twitching movements to get the blood moving, the same familiar routine he uses at the end of one of those fights that go to shit and even though everything else's double-checked-dead he just can't get himself to let go of his sword-hilt.

"That's-- I never," he mutters, his eyes flicking down to his hand still knotted in his jacket. "I've never-- I mean, I've had sex, I've had _lots_ of-- wait, no, I mean-- I wasn't trying to say that, I just, I never, just. With heat. I didn't think I'd-- maybe-- I can go back to my cave, if you-- this."

He turns his hand up, staring at the hem of his gambeson where the corner's frayed, and while he doesn't entertain the desire to bury his face in it like he's a shaelmaar, he can't say there isn't the _urge_.

"Sorry," he says. "I think this might get... complicated."

"Lambert," Keira returns dryly, "If I wanted to have you easily, I'd have had you to dinner and laid you within the first week."

He can't help but look at her at that, eyes skating frenetically over her face for any possible tell.

But she had said it, hadn't she?

She'd said that she wanted,

that what she wanted was,

She'd said what she wanted was him.

And it's not like she _really_ needs his skills, or his experience, or his dick, or just about anything else he can do. Because it's not like there aren't better options on that front, and he's fucking _seen_ her get better offers.

And there's only ever been one thing in his life he can actually call his, that he's actually gotten to keep, and it's always only been himself. Destiny has always been the fucking thug at the corner of every turn in his life, lying in ambush to punch him in the gut and kick him when he's down and take and take and _take,_ and hasn't ever, not once, given shit-all back. So he'd decided, way at the start, when he was still that stupid, scared little kid hiding under the bed because it kept him safe from monsters, that no matter what, no matter how bad it hurt, he'd never let anyone, anything, ever make him give up on what made him himself.

Because it's only ever been the one thing he had, only ever been the one thing he can always rely on, and if anyone tried to take it from him they'd have to pry it bloody from his death-cramped fucking fingers.

So he can't say it's ever been something he's actually put a lot of thought into _sharing_ with anyone else.

Which had been working for him so far, because, hey, he knows who he is, it's not like anyone'd _ask--_

She'd asked, though.

Keira's moved her hand from his chest to a slow path down his arm where it's still frozen out-stretched, stroking her fingers with soothing pressure up and down the inside of his wrist.

She said--

So he watches her face with that sort of all-consuming-focus he usually has to down a potion for as he slowly turns his hand back and drops the gambeson in its usual pile on the floor near the fire.

And she just flicks her attention down to the gambeson now crumpled by the fire long enough to wrinkle her nose in distaste, like she always does. For some reason, it makes him feel far better than he would've if she'd tried a supportive smile or to _praise_ him for it. He has the very real suspicion anything like that at this point in time would probably send him careening out her window. He has the very real suspicion Keira's aware of this, too.

She brings her delicate-fingered scholar's hands down to his open one, laces their fingers together, and steps back, tugging him gently in the direction of the bed.

And she'd said she wanted him there, so he goes.

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly as much as this is still abo it's mainly me enjoying the dynamic of Keira/Lambert as "uptown ara ara treats a wrong-side-of-the-tracks tsundere Right"! So expect more of that.
> 
> cliff notes for ya:  
> young!lambert: hey so is this witcher stuff i'm going through at least going to cure my ptsd  
> kaer morhen: no we will just slather it in emotional repression instead and possibly make it worse  
> young!lambert: >( i hate this stupid cult
> 
> if you liked my fic, please remember to leave kudos! 
> 
> (｡òᴗ-)7✧ i like seeing who liked my stuff.


End file.
